Creating a Course: What?

(For the slides and Arabic videos about this topic, please visit the TOT course website)

Any teacher or trainer will get, someday, to the point where they create a new course from scratch! That may seem terrifying for some ...

Well, the responsibility is not something you should ignore, and the amount of work is not that little either.

I will try to help you with some of the steps that you may go through to develop a course, but, as always, look for more information whenever and wherever you may find it.

What is a course?

I may define a course as a st of related lessons that serve a common goal to fill a larger gap of knowledge, skills, and abilities.

In the above definition, there are three keywords:

• Related: The lessons should be related logically so that the learner could connect the content in a useful manner. I am not talking about subject-related (math, physics, and arts), rather the whole idea should be complemented by the relatedness (draw a body immersed in water then evaluate the forces acting on it using physics and math knowledge).
• Common Goal: The whole course, as we will discuss later, is planned to fulfill some objectives, any lesson/topic/activity/assessment planned in the course should serve those objectives in a direct manner (most of the time). Otherwise, the lesson should not be included in the course in the first place, or even worse, the objectives of the course are not well specified!
• Larger Gap: Learning, in general, should be filling some knowledge, skill, or ability gap that exists within the learner. Any lesson should be planned to fill a gap, hence, the integration of the lessons should be planned to fill a bigger gap.

Another, somewhat hazy, characteristic of a course, is the time span!

We can not set a certain time-span for a course. There maybe a course that can be delivered in 12 hours over one or two days, and another one that may be delivered in 90 hours over 16 weeks!

Keep in mind, when planning the time for your course:

• Professional courses are usually short, 6 to 30 hours, with 3 to 8 hours days (a session is usually planned for 90 minutes)
• Academic courses are usually spread over a longer time span (8 to 16 weeks) much shorter gatherings that may extend 1 to 3 hours per week.
• Do not plan home assignments for professional course if the gatherings are going to be in consecutive days, they will not do it!
• When setting the the gathering length, consider the ability of the learners to comprehend and digest the material. Courses that involve programming, for example, should not extend more than 3 hours per gathering as the mental load is usually high.

(You may find more tips about Classroom Time Management on our TOT Course website)

In the next article, we will discuss some guidelines for creating a new course.